Thursday, December 29, 2011

Conclusion

This critique
has presented new sources, and cast new light on old sources, which demonstrate
the many different forms of proof that exist for the Aktion Reinhard
extermination program. We have clearly established in Chapters 2-4 the timeline
through which policy evolved from decimation to extermination, and how the
planned locations shifted from the Strongpoints to the death camps in Poland.
We have synthesized documents from the Nuremberg and Eichmann trials with those
in American, German and former Soviet archives to build a detailed picture of
how the policy of extermination was understood and implemented at the centre
and at the sites of death themselves. We have taken the twisted road to Belzec
via this documentation and shown how the twists in the road can be better
understood in the light of the convergence of evidence.

We have then gone into the death
camps themselves in more detail on some issues than has ever been attempted
before in published form by an academic historian. Four full chapters present
our extensive findings from over 65 years’ worth of site report, maps and
excavations. We have proved conclusively that “no mass graves” is a denier
fantasy, repetition of which would make MGK seem as moronic as the posts that
appear from denier cheerleaders on the Internet. The perpetrator testimonies
from the NIOD files and from the Trawnikis that we have presented here have
enabled us to put to rest denier memes such the diesel issue, although we would
expect this meme to be too big a crutch for deniers to throw away even with
such a comprehensive review of the witnesses. We have also demonstrated how
denial arguments concerning such technical matters as skin color, which Kues in
particular has chosen to embrace, are based on misreading and mistranslation of
sources.

It is important to contrast this with
what we have shown to be the mediocre output and skewed logic of MGK. We can
summarize the failures of their work, not only in the order of our chapters
here, but also by following the perverse chapter structure which they impose on
their own books, such as in Sobibór. Our chapter structure shows their
non-existent grasp of Nazi policy, deportation realities, the political economy
of Nazi occupation of the East (such as food supply, which made resettlement
impossible), the nature of eyewitness testimony, and the scope and findings of
postwar site investigations. Their own structure shows a failure to document a
conspiracy in World War II; their inability to confront the real sequence by
which knowledge of extermination came to be accepted in the West; their lack of
any methodology or internal consistency in how they treat witnesses; their
reliance upon a view of West German legal processes that is taken from paranoid
fiction; and their total inability to document the survival of the Aktion
Reinhard deportees whom the rational world and legal system assumes to have
died in the camps of Belzec, Treblinka and Sobibor.

Conspiratorial reasoning cannot
explain why West German defendants gave testimonies that converge with those
given by Trawnikis that have been buried for decades in obscure files. It is
unable to reason with the sentencing of defendants whose terms bore no relation
to whether they made admissions or not. It leads them to overlook facts documented
in judgments, such as the fact that Oberhauser’s sentence was reduced in West
Germany because he had already served a sentence in East Germany, having been
convicted in Magdeburg in 1948.[1]

Conspiracy also cannot grasp why
evidence concerning Aktion Reinhard was given by perpetrators during postwar
interrogations concerning other sites. For example, as we showed in Chapters 2
and 5, Wirth was linked to a euthanasia task in the Lublin area by the T4
testimony of Gorgass. He was shown to have already shot Jews at Hartheim by the
testimony of Nohel. MGK also never discuss why Eichmann described extermination
to Sassen while a free man; or why Rauff gave a deposition while free in Chile;
or why Gomerski accepted after his release on health grounds that he had
deserved a custodial sentence, albeit a shorter one. Kues’ paranoid fantasies
about defendants being ‘conveniently’ murdered, usually by unnamed Jews, are
built on false assumptions and a selective reading of newspaper sources,
deliberately omitting details that disprove his thesis.

Graf’s conspiracism regarding West
Germany in the 1960s exaggerates the nation-state’s power to control all
dissenting information at that time. This can be shown by the example of the
USSR dissidents Sinyavsky, Daniel and Ginzburg whose trials were reported in
the west. In 1969, Daniel and Ginzburg, “along with four other prisoners [wrote] an open
letter to the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, urging "corrective
legislation" to change the regulations in camps like Potma, where,
according to official designation, "especially dangerous political
prisoners" are held […] [The] letter was being circulated widely in
Moscow.”[2] Why
couldn’t MGK’s persecuted Nazis smuggle out such letters? Why did they not give
exculpatory details anonymously to third parties (sympathetic pro-Nazis like
MGK themselves) who would have been only too happy to courier them? Why did
these victims of the hoax not even retract their confessions on their
death-beds or in private manuscripts that could later be sent to denier outlets
after the perpetrator’s death?

This
raises another problem: the resettlement hypothesis. If the Soviets could not
eliminate dissent from three dissidents, how could they silence all the
witnesses to the resettlement of the Jews? The resettlement hypothesis does not
just require the state to silence most witnesses most of the time, but all of
them all the time in all places, even after Jews emigrated from the USSR to
Israel and the USA. State repression must attain perfection and be enforced on
a global scale, which is simply a mirage of the conspiracy theorist.

This is just one of many problems
that MGK have with witnesses. A further insurmountable problem is that Mattogno
and Kues fundamentally disagree on the value of witnesses. Mattogno misuses
Baynac out of context to insist that “testimony, if not supported by a
document, is worthless from the historical point of view, regardless of the
notion of “converging testimonies”, as is shown by the example of the
“converging” testimonial evidence for the Auschwitz 4 million victim figure.”[3] In
contrast, Kues attempts to use convergence of witnesses without documents to
prove resettlement, as we showed in Chapter 4. This contradiction can only be
sustained through cognitive dissonance on the part of both parties.
Furthermore, Mattogno breaks his own rule in his policy chapters, such as in
his reliance upon Höss and Wisliceny to dispute the historiography of the
spring 1942 escalation, while ignoring the copious documentation on that
escalation that we discussed in chapters 2 and 3. Mattogno’s obsession with
“the ‘converging’ testimonial evidence for the Auschwitz 4 million victim
figure” ignores the fact that Höss gave lower figures.[4]

Such contradictions and confusions
arise, in part, from MGK’s refusal to spell out their working assumptions when
they discuss testimonies. They rely on the reader’s incredulity, but such
reliance can only preach to the converted denier. A neutral reader will always
ask why such-and-such an anomaly should matter, or why this testimony is being
highlighted while others are ignored. We are compelled to conclude that this
silence is designed deliberately to permit MGK to choose methods of
convenience, which then makes them unaccountable for their omissions and selective
biases. This is also a major reason why MGK avoid peer review.

MGK have also, by pursuing this
strategy, made themselves unaccountable to other deniers. For example,
Mattogno’s use of Himmler’s racial policy document of May 1940[5] to
support a policy of ‘emigration’ can be traced all the way back to his first
‘Myth’ essay of 1985[6], but
this was implicitly rejected by Walendy, who declared it a forgery in 1991.[7] If
Mattogno cannot defend his case against refutations by Revisionists with whom
he concurs elsewhere in his texts, why should we expect him to engage with
opponents such as ourselves who deal with the evidence in good faith? Or is
Mattogno brushing this Revisionist dissensus under the carpet in the knowledge
that such open disagreements on method expose negationism as actually having no
method except negation?

This leaves MGK grasping at the “no
mass graves” straw, but this rings more hollow every year. The attempt to
poison the well by blaming the Soviet investigators for effectively hoaxing
mass graves ignores the fact that western journalists were shown human remains
at Babi Yar[8],
Klooga[9] and near
Majdanek, and a huge store of plundered property in Lublin.[10]

The misrepresentations in MGK’s work
are too systematic to be simply due to misreading and miscomprehension. There
are numerous occasions when their statements about a text are contradicted by
the very text that is front of their noses. For example, Sobibór attacks
Henry Friedlander and claims there is no documentary proof, only post-war testimony,
of the use of gas chambers in the euthanasia program[11], yet
the Friedlander book they cite has such a document clearly spelled out, in
which gas canisters were delivered from I.G. Farben’s BASF site.[12]

The numerous mistakes found in MGK
can be classified under the following types: contradictions amongst themselves
and within their own arguments, quote-mines of various material (documents,
witnesses, and secondary literature), selective citations of the available
evidence or historiography, blatant misrepresentations of the evidence of
historiography, arguments based on incomprehension and incredulity, and various
other types of logical fallacies (e.g. falsus in uno). Many of the
mistakes arise from the basic shortcomings found in their work, most notably a
lack of reading, a lack of archival research, as well as their piecemeal
approach to the evidence. In short, MGK have failed to address the evidence,
let alone do so in a reasonable fashion. This critique then has demonstrably
proven their works to rely largely on ignorance and dishonesty, two attributes
most associated with Holocaust denial by the public at large. Which flaw is
more central to MGK’s work, the present authors shall leave as an open
question.

As MGK are the most prolific and
research driven of all active Revisionists, and are also typically the most
praised authors among the few deniers that actually read their own literature,
the downfall of MGK then serves as a telling sign about the state of
Revisionism. If they are the best, what does that say about the rest? Nothing
good, as should be fairly obvious. Indeed, as the only Revisionists left who
have visited an archive, and producing the most credible attempts to rewrite
the history of the Holocaust, MGK’s failure to honestly and openly argue the
available evidence should remove all possible doubt to any ‘skeptics’ about the
lack of professional integrity and accuracy of Holocaust denial. Simply
refuting their work, however, misses a crucial part of a proper analysis of
MGK, namely the driving force behind MGK’s fraudulent work.

This need to misread Holocaust
historians, in order to defame their work, derives partly from envy of genuine
academic achievement but also, most strongly, from a commitment by all three
authors to neo-Nazi politics and/or antisemitic beliefs. Sobibór is
dedicated to Jürgen Rieger, the deceased former deputy chairman
of the National Democratic Party of Germany. The final chapter of the same work
contains a eulogy to Horst Mahler[13], who once stated that "billions of people would be ready
to forgive Hitler if he had murdered only the Jews."[14]Sobibór
also has unsourced speculation by Graf that Zionists were “unhesitatingly
prepared to sacrifice hundreds of thousands of their own brethren.” The same
page then blames Zionists for “firing up” German anti-Jewish feeling in 1933.[15] Graf is
happy to play the typical racist blame-the-victim game.

Indeed, among the three authors
Graf’s political statements and beliefs emerge as the strongest. He joined the
pro-Stalinist Institute of the Russian Civilization, a group that spreads
antisemitic positions, such as through reprinting and defending the
authenticity of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and accusing Jews of using
Christian blood in their rituals.[16] In a
2002 interview, Graf asked, “What to do with those Jews? We’re cultured people,
we can’t exterminate them. What to do with them? I don’t know.”[17] Graf
has stated that he believes that we are living in "a globalist system of
pseudo-democratic régimes in which Jews control the government and the
opposition at the same time (the classic examples being the U.S., Great
Britain, and France)" and that "in any European society the Jewish
Community will attempt to continue its destructive work.”[18] He
deplores the "fallacious doctrine of racial equality", which he
believes "made possible the catastrophe of forced racial integration in
the USA, which has done immeasurable harm to both the white and the black
populations..."[19]

Furthermore, in a recent response to
Christian Lindtner, a Revisionist who later became convinced about the truth of
exterminations, Graf unleashed a barrage of horrid antisemitic attacks. In
desperately trying to explain why some German perpetrators who provided
confirmation of exterminations and gassings were given life imprisonment
(instead of leniency or pardons, as Graf argues as a method of coercion, see
Chapter 1), Graf writes that such long sentences arose because “after all, the
Jews wanted their pound of flesh!”[20] Graf
provides no evidence that Jews had any power over the German judiciary system
in the postwar period, while such a reference to “pound of flesh” harks back to
many centuries old religious attacks on Jews of the blood libel type. Graf then
goes on to accuse Lindtner of identifying with “the Jewish version” of events,
and even using “Jewish newspeak” by labelling Revisionism as denial.[21] Thus,
in his fit of rage against Lindtner, Graf further exposed his antisemitic
beliefs.

Mattogno is much more guarded in his
statements but, in 2010, wrote an article on the Protocols of the Elders of
Zionwhich stated that the “aspiration to world domination by the
Jews…is already expressed explicitly” in rabbinical texts and constitutes “the
very essence of Jewish messianism.” Mattogno cites approvingly the claims by
Bernard Lazare and his own brother that Jews have, throughout history and
across all societies in which they have settled, brought persecution upon
themselves through their own behaviours.[22] His
brother has also given an interview in which he has stated that:

From the Talmud, the Midrash and other
rabbinical texts of the tradition we learn that the murder of non-jew [sic] is
not only permitted but also required, and that this murder could take the form
of an actual ritual sacrifice offered to Yahweh. It is a subject that deserves
to be investigated, starting from the concept of "cherem", anathema,
the extermination of votive enemies of Israel, the annihilation of the Jewish
goyim consecrated to God.[23]

Distaste for Jews was
expressed by Mattogno when he wrote the following regarding van Pelt in 2003:

[Jean-Claude Pressac] was no longer a
valuable goldmine to the guardians of the 'Holocaust' orthodoxy, but had turned
into a more and more rebellious and uncontrollable Goy, jeopardizing the official historiography with each new
publication.[...]
For this reason, the position as the "world's leading Auschwitz
expert," until then occupied by Pressac, was taken by a trustworthy Yehudi, who was to take Pressac's theses
- cleaned from all revisionist waste - and embed them into an unalterable,
definitive version of Auschwitz.[24]

It is very noteworthy that Mattogno identifies
the two historians most damaging to his work on Auschwitz, Jean-Claude Pressac
(‘uncontrollable Goy’) and Robert Van Pelt (‘trustworthy Yehudi’), with Jewish
names and terms.

Perhaps
the most elusive of the trio in terms of antisemitism is Thomas Kues. Kues sees
the global community, particularly the European Union and NATO, as being run by
“Zionist masters.”[25] Kues
offers no proof that Israel controls such entities, but simply assumes that
this is the case based on a 2008 letter from the chairman at Yad Vashem to the
Lithuanian prime minister[26]; not
any statement from a US, EU, or NATO figure. Kues attacks Jewish historian
Yitzhak Arad as an “NKVD hangman”, without any shred of evidence.[27] He
plays up Jewish guilt for various things, such as serving as “butchers” during
the Second World War (presumably in the form of partisans or NKVD officials),
while also chastising Israel for being “a haven for any criminal who can prove
Jewish ancestry.” This is a strawman of the real
history of the Law of Return, which has infact been used to exclude persons
“with a criminal past, likely to endanger public welfare.” Kues also ignores
the fact that the Law of Return is a subject of controversy in Israel itself;
like all antisemites, he treats Israeli politics as monolithic.[28] It
seems that Kues is happy to neglect basic research and crucial distinctions
when he has a polemical agenda. Kues understands his audience and the support they would offer to such
statements; for instance, see Kues’ requests for revisionist information from
Brazilian white nationalists on Stormfront.[29]

When
asking his readers to decide between two groups of intellectuals on whose work
our civilization rests (creating an artificial division which no respectable
philosopher or intellectual historian would allow, as ideas from the given
writers transgress such divides), Kues lists the lesser intellectuals as “Freud,
Marcuse, and Elie Wiesel.”[30] Is it
just coincidence that these three are all Jewish?

It is
an easily observed point that conspiracy theorists (such as Holocaust deniers)
have a strong propensity to believe in more than one conspiracy. Obviously, if
the world and its history are not as we are told for one instance, than every
agency involved with that instance should be interpreted differently. As no
occurrence is wholly independent from its circumstances, conventional reasons
for previous and subsequent events are then to be altered to reflect a
different trajectory of historical development, better reflecting reality if
the original conspiracy were true. This brings about a cascade or avalanche of
conspiracies and fringe beliefs in the continued attempt to establish a true
history of events, based on the core
conspiracy claim. The idea that conspiracy theorists “live in their own
world” thus is not simply criticism of their mental capacity, but also a
statement sufficiently describing reality and historical events as they are
typically understood by conspiracy theorists.

It is
in this light that one should view the conspiracy claims that MGK make across
their work regarding the hoax of the Holocaust, many of which have been
discussed in the chapters of this critique. This also accounts for the
conspiracy claims made by the trio beyond the years of 1933-1945. For instance,
Graf and Mattogno’s defense and association with the Protocols of the Elders of
Zion fits this pattern, as does Kues’ belief that “sick Jewish gangsters and their ilk” were behind the
suicide of German death camp perpetrators far into the postwar years.[31] So too
does Graf’s belief that the September 11, 2001 terror attacks upon the United
States (one of the states dependent on the lie for the Israeli state,
allegedly) were an example of a “self-inflicted” attack, which he fears is part
of the possible wider “response of democracies to Revisionism.”[32] No
doubt these conspiracy claims are fuelled by antsemitism, as already shown, to
varying degrees amongst the three authors.

These antisemitic and conspiratorial
politics, combined with systematic lying, are clearly a major factor in the
refusal of Holocaust historians to debate MGK, yet they continue to play the
role of the aggrieved party. The Holocaust Handbooks series carries this
promotional spiel:

These books are designed to have the power
to both convince the common reader as well as academics in this field. And it
is very successful with this approach! The final goal is to eventually tip the
academic scale, so that academia will start doing its duty: to demand and
pursue public scrutiny of this most influential topic of all western societies.
Because as long as academics don't do this, the media and politicians certainly
will not do it either.[33]

If MGK subscribe to this
belief, we must question their ability to acquire any self-awareness over a
lifetime of failure to convince any academic historian that they may have a
point.

In the light of their politics and
dishonesty, and the hammering their work has received in our foregoing
chapters, we must also ask: where now for the Three Stooges of Revisionist
pseudohistoriography? A major problem they face is simply the lack of an
audience. The crew at Holocaust Controversies are now virtually the only people
taking more than a passing interest in the writing of Mattogno as he enters his
second quarter-century as an author. For example, according to an Internet
search done by ourselves, in the twelve months spanning August 2010 to July
2011, Mattogno was mentioned only 112 times at CODOH, whilst Kues received 70
mentions and Graf, who has become the runt of this litter, only 48. Many of
these mentions were generated by Internet exchanges between HC authors and
Mattogno or Graf, thereby confirming that MGK are dependent on traffic from HC
to a degree that must cause them discomfort. Ironically, however, Kues, Graf
and Mattogno have failed to respond to the vast majority of points made in
articles which we wrote about them between 2006 and the present.

Moreover, what does the term
‘research’ mean to MGK? For Kues, it does not yet seem to have included
visiting an archive, although his reading of the up-to-date secondary
literature seems to be more thorough than that of Mattogno. Although Mattogno has
visited archives, his bibliography in Sobibor is missing entire collections
that would be essential to such a project. In other cases, he has visited
relevant archives in Warsaw and Lublin but evidently did not spend long enough
there to find a number of frequently cited files widely used by genuine
specialists in the field. The greatest omission is really his ignorance of the
core captured German documents and BDC materials, available in the USA and in
Germany. In the entire trilogy, Mattogno cites from just one file from the
Bundesarchiv and two from the German Foreign Office archive. This is a
sufficiently low number that one could justifiably doubt whether Mattogno has
even seen the files in question. He cites from just one file from the National
Archives of Belarus which is misnumbered in Treblinka.
Would Mattogno expect us to believe that he stopped off in Minsk and asked to
see a single file?

It is therefore to be expected that
MGK’s work will continue to decline in quality, and will lean increasingly on
Kues’ IH outlet, where he can focus narrowly on just one piece of the jigsaw at
a time. Meanwhile, potential converts to their work will continue to become
disaffected and walk away from their circle, as one founding member of IH has
already done.[34]
Comments from that former member can be found in the Afterword.

In case MGK have the courage to
respond to this critique, we would like to set some provisions required for us
to take any ‘risposta’ into serious consideration. We will not accept any
effort that only deals with our critique in a piecemeal and isolated fashion,
hence we will be little concerned with any response that just focuses on the
technical minutiae of the camps without recognizing the importance of Nazi
policy. The Reinhard camps weren’t created in a vacuum, and we expect MGK to
recognize that fact. That is why we dare MGK to follow the structure of the
present critique, so as to put things in proper perspective. As mentioned,
arguments not told in narrative form often fail a simple bullshit test.

While we don’t expect MGK to deal
with all of the evidence (we haven’t either, which goes to show how much
exists), we do insist that they deal with far more than they have so far in
their previous failed attempts. It is also incumbent upon them to include all
relevant contexts for the evidence they do select, and thus avoid isolating
documents as if they too were created in a vacuum. For example, in looking at
Korherr’s use of “Sonderbehandlung” in his famous report, the understanding
that such a phrase meant killing does not stand on its own but exists inside a
wider pattern of abductive inferences from many other sources related to
Nazi-Jewish policy. A reversion by MGK back to old ways of decontextualization
and isolation of the evidence is simply unacceptable to us, and will meet a
grade of non sufficiente.

We also expect MGK to take note of
many of the serious errors which we have spotlighted in this critique. We have
demonstrated that they are unequivocally wrong on innumerable occasions. Simply
adapting or omitting their mistakes from future versions of their work will not
be good enough; instead, we would hope that MGK admit their mistakes in an
honest fashion, open to their readers and the public.

The late Raul Hilberg once said,
deniers "are like children who say: prove it! And so we must, prove
it!" Hilberg could have added that deniers are asking historians to
reinvent the wheel, because the Holocaust was already proven in the 1940s. We
have therefore responded to a child who is not asking for proof beyond
reasonable doubt, but is instead insisting on proof beyond unreasonable doubt.
We have shown that the unreasonable doubts are based on bad faith, yet we have
still managed to overcome them by providing proof that even a manic hyper-positivist
would find hard to deny. We therefore request MGK to make a reasonable response
to this critique, but we can only predict that their response will be
unreasoned, hysterical and not fully honest.

[8]New York Times, 29.11.43; the reporter, W.H. Lawrence, was
sceptical about the number of deaths claimed: Laurel Leff, Buried by The
Times: the Holocaust and America’s most important newspaper, Cambridge, 2005;
Bill Lawrence, Six Presidents, Too Many Wars, New York, 1972, p.92.

[10] ‘Nazi Mass Killing Laid Bare in Camp’, New York Times,
30.8.41, p.1. The journalist, again W.H. Lawrence, expressed uncertainty
regarding the reliability of the Soviets’ 1.5 million death estimate, but
personally witnessed “three of ten opened mass graves and looked upon 368
partly decomposed bodies of men, women and children who had been executed
individually in a variety of cruel and horrible means” at nearby Krepiecki. He
also visited “a warehouse in downtown Lublin in which I saw hundreds of
suitcases and literally tens of thousands of pieces of clothing and personal
effects of people who died here”; and he “had the opportunity of questioning a
German officer, Herman Vogel, 42, of Millheim, who admitted that as head of the
clothing barracks he had supervised the shipment of eighteen freightcar loads
of clothing to Germany during a two month period and that he knew it came from
the bodies of persons who had been killed at Maidanek.” Vogel was later
executed by the Poles.

[12] Friedlander, The Origins of Nazi Genocide, p.331n.65, citing
correspondence between the KTI, the KdF, and IG Farbenindustrie. DÖW, E18370/1,
and BAK, R58/1059. See also De Mildt, Dick, In The Name of the People.
Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1996, pp.78-94, citing JuNSV Bd. 733.

[21]Ibid., see
Part 7 on “The ‘Vergasungskeller’ letter.” Graf should also have a conversation
with pseudonym Denierbud and Friedrich Paul Berg over their use “Jewish
newspeak,” as both readily identify themselves as ‘deniers’.

[26]The letter
involved Lithuania’s investigation of former Yad Vashem chairman Yitzhak Arad
for war crimes while fighting as a partisan in Lithuania against Nazi Germany.
Kues never bothers to consider the public relations interest that Yad Vashem
had over the issue involving its former personell, but instead identifies the
institute with a Zionist control over Europe.

[27]The
investigation mentioned in the previous footnote was stopped due to
insufficient evidence.

[30]Thomas
Kues, ‘Speaking about Satan-A Note on Yehuda Bauer’s foreword to Filip Müller’s
Three Years in the Gas Chambers’, http://www.codoh.com/newrevoices/nrtkbauer.html. Kues offers the superior thinkers
as Aristotle, Voltaire, and Nietzsche. Nietzsche would hardly enjoy being
invoked by Kues. As Nieztsche once wrote to his sister in the 1880s, “ Your association with an anti-Semite expresses a
foreignness to my whole way of life which fills me ever again and again with
ire or melancholy...It is a matter of honor to me to be absolutely clean and
unequivocal in relation to anti-Semitism, namely opposed as I am in my
writings...My disgust with this party (which would like all too well the
advantage of my name!) is as outspoken as possible. And that I am unable to do
anything against it, that in every Anti-Semitic Correspondence Sheet the name
of Zarathustra is used, has already made me almost sick several times.”

"I was commandant of Auschwitz until 1 December 1943 and I estimate that at least 2,500,000 victims were executed and exterminated there in gas chambers and crematories. At least a further half million people died from hunger and sickness, which adds up to a total amount of about 3,000,000 deaths."

Surely you meant to refer to "his" memoirs, or "Hoess's letter" Gustav Gilbert's kept secret before and after the Eichmann trial?

Oh noes! Le gasp! A TYPO! The whole critique is worthless! The documents cited in the first part are all bollocks! The Jews were actually resettled in the east, like MGK claim! Wow! Thanks; a real eye opener!

For those who are interested, the news clipping is in this old blog. http://holocaustcontroversies.blogspot.com/2011/02/mass-graves-and-majdanek.html

"I was commandant of Auschwitz until 1 December 1943 and I estimate that at least 2,500,000 victims were executed and exterminated there in gas chambers and crematories. At least a further half million people died from hunger and sickness, which adds up to a total amount of about 3,000,000 deaths."

Surely you meant to refer to "his" memoirs, or "Hoess's letter" Gustav Gilbert's kept secret before and after the Eichmann trial?

It's still less than 4 million. Mattogno is still setting up a straw man by claiming "convergence" without considering an important source like Hoess. Nice try.